This magazine is dedicated to discussions on the federated social networking ecosystem, which includes decentralized and open-source social media platforms. Whether you are a user, developer, or simply interested in the concept of decentralized social media, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as the benefits and challenges of decentralized social media, new and existing federated platforms, and more. From the latest developments and trends to ethical considerations and the future of federated social media, this category covers a wide range of topics related to the Fediverse.
Some of y'all getting angry need to look at yourself in the mirror. The whole point of federation was to allow communities to do things like this if they want.
A lot of new people are going to see this mudslinging and rightfully turn around. Nobody is coming to Lemmy to see drama between instances.
I thought the whole point of federation was that everything from every federated instance was connected and I only need one account to see every part of it. The fact that federation has been the only discussion since the blackout is not good for the alternatives to reddit. My whole life is tech and if it's this distracting to me I can't imagine any remotely average user being interested. The fact that this was the perfect time to be part of an alternative but the whole experience has mostly just proven reddits "give it a week" response true.
I thought the whole point of federation was that everything from every federated instance was connected and I only need one account to see every part of it.
That was never going to happen, not even in the best possible case.
Far left and far right are always going to split off. Do you want to be having discussions about race with neo nazis? I don't. Let them go to their own dark corner of the internet.
I thought the whole point of federation was that everything from every federated instance was connected and I only need one account to see every part of it.
No. If an instance hosts toxic communities then your instance can choose to defederate from it. You don't have to wait for the centralized authority to ban them. It's about being able to choose your admins and form a web of "good" communities.
kbin is only live a month or so.... of course there will be problems and missing moderation tools - it wont be much better for lemmy.
There is no perfect time - some people will stay some will go back to reddit witout any change. thats a user thing not the fault of beehaw or the federation of servers.
I do think it's fair to criticize the decision to try to be one of the largest instances while only having four moderators. They should have accepted a place as a midsize instance with midsize communities in order to maintain their moderation goals. Or they could have worked to get more moderators. Blaming the defederated instances and mod tools seem disingenuous at best. That said mod tools undoubtedly need improvement.
To be fair, they said the reason they were defederating from those two instances in particular is because most of their moderation involved people from them. They didn't expand beehaw beyond what they could handle, the rest of lemmy expanded beyond what they could handle. If this really is just a temporary measure, which is also what they said, then I think it's pretty reasonable.
That's because they defederated from the two largest competing instances. I'm talking about the communities users not the instances. The issue is that beehaw has the largest and therefore defacto default communities. The timing is bad and will likely affect wider adoption. The biggest problem is that it is entirely foreseeable and solved by either accepting a smaller community (closing signups) or improving moderation capabilities (getting more moderators or investing in an alternative moderation system) before it meant splitting the threadiverse in half.
I'm not denying that it sucks, but if you'd told anybody this was going to happen a month ago they'd have just laughed at you. Of course they were unprepared. Everbody has more than they can deal with. Adding more mods isn't as simple as picking some names out of a hat, and this isn't a thing anyone was preparing for. There currently are no alternative moderation systems, everything is too new and until recently was all way to small for that to be important, and they just have more work then they can deal with trying to suddenly moderate all of the threadiverse.
This was a bad option that sucked, but every option was a bad option that sucked. I'm more concerned with how they deal with things as they normalize over the coming weeks and months than I am with how they're trying to put out the fires in the short term.
I mean some people absolutely do love and feed on drama, but is that who we want to attract? They're not the nicest bunch to have around in my experience.
exactly this; the whole point was so instances could pick and choose who they wanted to interact with
I'd always heard that federation was good because if you get an instance infested with fascists, you (and everyone else who doesn't want anything to do with them) can just cut that instance loose and let it drift away
I guess others thought different?
I think this is a fair choice for Beehaw to make, but I am frustrated that now I have less content to read. I wish we had better community discovery tools.
This simply solidifies my opinion that I've had all along that Beehaw is a trash instance full of sensitive censor-happy ninnies and I hope they all resolve the issues they are having to eventually be finally free from trolls and assholes in their humble & beautiful walled-garden paradise echo chamber. All the best for them.
Isn't the whole point of the fediverse that you get to create and craft your experience for your community? There's a really good reason defederating is a feature. I don't get it, Beehaw decides to use the features of federation so now we: firstly become tribalistic (them vs us), and secondly decide to get angry? Like it or not, this is what you signed up for when you wanted federation.
I don't see the point of getting angry like this, and really don't see how this negativity being conducive to a thriving community. Some new people are going to explore fediverse, see tribalistic mudslinging among instances, and say "not for me."
I'd say respect their decision and move on, if it's not for you it's not for you.
Yeah, they're saying "look, we only have four mods, have a highly targeted type of community we are trying to build, and have had to disproportionately moderate users from these instances" which seems reasonable on it's face.
That's kind of the beauty of Lemmy/Kbin right? You can spin up an instance with whatever rules you want. I think people are reacting to the fact that during the Reddit exodus Beehaw kind of looked like a "default" general instance, including me.
But that's a misreading on our part, not them going back on that.
Absolutely. It’s disappointing that this person read a post made by the Beehaw admins that was written with nuance and grace, and then decided to respond with vitriol. That’s exactly the kind of attitude that is so prolific on Reddit, and I am happy to leave it behind. Thank you for your reasoned reply.
OP, I encourage you in the future to choose grace.
This kind of post right here is the gold standard for why I chose Kbin over other instances. Well reasoned, free of vitriol, and looking to build a new culture outside of the one a lot of us left behind on Reddit.
yeah, this is the weird thing; Beehaw's reasonings are incredibly reasonable, and they're not saying that the other parts of Lemmy aren't good enough for them, which is what I think a lot of people are getting mad at
that and thinking that they're entitled to access to Beehaw
Isn't the whole point of the fediverse that you get to create and craft your experience for your community? There's a really good reason defederating is a feature. I don't get it, Beehaw decides to use the features of federation so now we: firstly become tribalistic (them vs us), and secondly decide to get angry? Like it or not, this is what you signed up for when you wanted federation.
Yes, exactly
like we're not owed Beehaw's cooperation; it's their instance and if the users want to do this then that's their perogative
Regardless, this is being blown out of proportion; Beehaw outright said that this was temporary
100% - the beauty of the fedivers is that everybody can chose to federatre OR NOT!
If people wanne follow beehaw they can switch server or even go to some other fedivers project and follow from there.
Yeah I don't feel quite as harshly but as soon as I saw they didn't allow downvotes I knew their philosophy wasn't for me. Too bad about losing their gaming group though.
After reading that post, I'm actually pretty glad they're leaving.
I'll be honest, it's weird to not allow downvotes but be on a federated site. Idk if I'm weird or if that's just me tho. Like if you go to beehaw from another Lemmy instance you can downvote them.
most of the fedivers has no downvote - please be respectfulll of the diferences.
I have a beehaw account. I've only experienced one user who's a bit too intense about their thoughts. Everyone else has just been chill. The admin aren't defederating from lemmy.ml, the other big instance, and have no plans to do so. They really were just overwhelmed by the two feds they blocked because of trollish users. It's not as intense as you make it sound.
The sad reality is that during the reddit blackout, people were pushing lemmy (specifically Beehaw) as the reddit replacement because yay decentralized, federated, fun!
For a lot of those reddit refugees the effort they put into making content and trying to make Beehaw their home is gone now.
They're not going to want to start all over at a new instance and rebuild yet again.
They're just going to go back to reddit
I think the issue is that everyone's so focused on seeing Lemmy as a "notReddit" that they outright get pissed when it doesn't work the way they think it should (like Reddit except the parts they think are bad)
Lemmy (and kbin, and other similar platforms) and Reddit have the same niche, but they're not the same thing
All this talk of defederation and blocklists makes me generally uneasy. I understand how it's easy to fall into. Nobody wants political extremists and criminals and bad actors and stuff on their instance, so it makes sense you might want to ban trollfactory dot xyz, nazihq dot us, and/or uncompromisingmarxist dot boats, or whatever.
But I think the stupidest shit I saw on reddit were the subreddits that would ban you for even posting on an ideologically competing subreddit, with no consideration for the message you'd written. This is worse than that because it's the opposite, and includes even reading the content.
Imagine if when you went to post on /r/RestaurantOwners, and its AutoMod had the power to then immediately ban you from even looking at /r/antiwork and /r/WorkReform. Imagine posting to /r/conservative to correct someone's error only to get permanently banned from viewing any "leftist" subs ever again. This is the vibe I get from this and as much as I want to avoid creating nodules of extremism and hatred, I want less to have people grabbing my head, taping my mouth, and averting my eyes from things they don't like when they don't even know what my thinking is.
I feel like widespread trigger happy banlists are the death of small instances, too. Maybe one small instance doesn't catch some newly registered asshole for a day or two but it's too late. The 16-hour a day lifestyle moderator on a massive instance who has gangstalking delusions over nebulous "trolls" has already blacklisted all 150 of your users permanently and listed your domain for defederation as officially owned by the Nazi party in a massive register shared by the top 100 largest instances. The number of times I've heard this story with small Mastodon instances is more than I care for.
The admins at Beehaw have been explicit that this choice is not about locking their users in but about keeping bad actors out. But all of this is new, so the tools to accomplish that are crude for now.
You're not banned from looking at anything. Just go to their instance, abide by their signup rules and don't do the shit they defederated to avoid.
They should be running a standard forum software, but are already in too deep to fix the actual problem.
Ultimately this is because beehaw allowed themselves to become one of the largest instances on the threadiverse with a minimal mod team. Any blame on the other instances/mod tools is deflection. This is poor management at it's core and is bad for the larger community. That said I would love to see more in the way of improved mod tools.
I think one of the problems is communities all being created on the same few big instances that allow anyone to create one.
I don't get the issue here.
This is common in de-centralized social media.
Federation allows the admins of a server to decide what kind of servers they want to federate with, but also to defederate from others.
It's only two servers that were creating problems with all the trolling and intolerant comments that came from there. Beehaw didn't isolate itself/blocked everyone else in the fediverse.
I created my first account there but left for lemmy.world once I realised users couldn't create communities and all the communities were controlled by the same small group of admins.
I had enough of such cabals on Reddit.
No mods, No masters